Making a Movie

It is possible to make movies with VMD, through the use of Tcl or Python scripts, or with the ``vmdmovie'' extension included with VMD. Several movie making scripts are provided in the VMD script library on the VMD home page. These scripts can be used as-is, or they can be customized to perform complex animation tasks beyond the scope of this user guide. In general, movies are created by driving render commands with a script, producing a sequence of individual image files. When the script has completed rendering all of the individual frames, the images are ready for import into an animation package, or can be converted to one of several popular compressed movie formats by further processing. The ``vmdmovie'' extension provided with VMD completely automates the movie creation process, though it requires a number of software packages be installed in order to do the job. Please see the separate documentation on the movie scripts and ``vmdmovie'' in the VMD script library.